Prepare for and respond to customer questions (inquiries/dialogues) during scheduled one hour sessions with accurate information and actionable advice, subject to capacity and demand;

Prepare and deliver analysis in the form of presentation(s) delivered at one or more of the company’s Catalyst conferences, Summit, Symposium, webinars, or other industry speaking events;

Support business development for GTP by participating in sales support calls/visits subject to availability and management approval, etc”

For this role, we specifically want some of these areas of expertise:

“At least 15 years of progressively senior technical IT security and architecture experience gained in an end user or vendor organization, consulting and/or research roles as a technical expert in two or more of the following topics;

Infrastructure security for networks, computing, and storage systems

Data center security architecture

Network security architecture and zoning

Firewalls

Intrusion prevention/detection systems

Software-defined data center/network security architecture

Network virtualization security”

In essence, your job would be to do research, write papers, guide clients (via phone inquiries/dialogs) and speak at events. Also, we do list a lot of qualifications in the reqs, but you can look at my informal take on them in this post.

A few common questions that candidates have asked in the past (reproduced from my past blog posts):

Location? Any location in US/Canada/North America, mostly due to the desired time zone for client calls. This is non-negotiable for this role.

What does travel 20-25% really mean? In all honesty, there is not much travel, apart from 2-3 Gartner events per year, really. If you want to travel more, you can.

Do we really need at least 15 years experience? Well … we don’t really need 15 years, but we do need diverse and extensive experience (ideally, “vendor + enterprise/government + consultant”, but “pick any 2 of those” works as well, with enterprise/government security architect being the preferred background)

Is this a technical role? Well, it is a role for a technologist, a person who was hands-on and/or has a deep understanding of how security stuff works inside the box. However, Gartner does not really do lab product testing (you are welcome to have a home lab, of course, and some security analysts do) so there is a risk of losing some of the cutting edge technical hands-on skills. Ideally, you should be able to retain them (mostly) via ongoing conversations with “people who do stuff” (as opposed to “just talk about stuff”), but it may be challenging for some.

Anton Chuvakin
Research VP and Distinguished Analyst5+ years with Gartner 17 years IT industry

Anton Chuvakin is a Research VP and Distinguished Analyst at Gartner's GTP Security and Risk Management group. Before Mr. Chuvakin joined Gartner, his job responsibilities included security product management, evangelist… Read Full Bio

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